Vaccine denial – extremism of another kind in Pakistan

“Baaji (a formal term used respectfully to address a woman who is senior in age, rank or social status) I will not get this vaccine just yet because I am getting married in another few months. When I complete my family then I will think about it,” says Nazeer, a low-skilled domestic worker from Lahore.

Nazeer and others like him (a teeming population of Pakistan’s poor who are prone to suggestion by extremist factions) believe that the Covid vaccine is a Western ploy designed to make Muslim men impotent. That is if they believe in the pandemic at all. This astonishing lack of civic response is just one fractured segment of an overall grim picture when it comes to Pakistan’s vaccine response. 

Vaccines supplied by Chinese companies arrived in Pakistan in late 2020. Image: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_Covid_vaccine_Pakistan.jpg)

To date, Pakistan has surpassed 936,100 confirmed Covid cases with deaths recorded at about 21,450. These are economical estimates as the rate of testing has remained substantially low – 0.18 tests per 1,000 people. The positivity rate is 3.1 percent at the time of writing this article. Why, when numbers are high, thousands are diagnosed daily and the public/private healthcare system has, until recently, been one bed away from collapse, do attitudes like Nazeer’s exist?

A general mistrust and visible scepticism around the ability of state institutions to perform and look after public welfare lies at the root of the issue. Public healthcare is in shambles – global indicators rank Pakistan as abysmally low in access to it and in prolonged child mortality figures. The government is not trusted by the people.

It is not trusted when it tells them that a pandemic is raging around the world, with numbers skyrocketing in the country. It is not trusted when vaccine rollouts are announced. And it is not trusted when it tells them that these vaccines are safe and necessary.

This vacuum of apprehension is quickly filled by extremist elements who successfully convince large swathes of rural-dwelling populations that the vaccine is a cleverly concocted plot of ‘Western forces’ to either wipe out Muslims around the world (one pervasively perpetuated myth has it that people will die two years after getting the vaccine) or make them infertile. Quack doctors who ply their trade in back alleys due to lack of government oversight and official registration tell whoever will listen that the vaccine will inject “nanobots” and “tracking devices” inside them, forever scapegoating them to foreign-funded projects.

Dr Rana Imran sikander who heads the covid ward at PIMS became the first person to recieve covid vaccination to kick off the national covid vaccination drive in Pakistan pic.twitter.com/jDt1SwUCUb

— Asad Umar (@Asad_Umar) February 2, 2021

And easy acceptance of this drivel exists in part due to past mistakes. In early 2010, the CIA ran a fake hepatitis vaccination programme for children in the city where Osama bin Laden was eventually caught and killed. This vaccination drive was a cover to collect DNA samples. The story broke after the death of bin Laden and added a maelstrom of fuel to the conspiracy theory that all healthcare initiatives launched in Pakistan by western projects are fronts for sinister ends. Clerics, extremist factions, local leaders in rural areas and small cities condemned any kind of vaccines, forbidding parents from getting their children inoculated. Pakistan is one of the only two countries in the world to still have a substantial number of cases of polio recorded every year, an uptick of which was seen after 2010. Polio is a globally eradicated disease. In Pakistan, it is accepted as fact.

A recent Gallup survey showed that 64 percent of Pakistanis believed that the threat of the virus was overblown. “A lot of the patients who come in to see me don’t believe in the existence of Covid. They believe it is a minor flu and because they believe that, they refuse to follow SOPs [Standard Operating Procedures],” says Arif, a frontline healthcare professional from Lahore, one of the country’s largest urban centres, “They say they don’t know how safe the vaccine is and what the side-effects will be. They are waiting to see how other people who have had the vaccine will fare. If you classify everyone as a potential in waiting, who will go and get vaccinated?”

So far, in a country of 220 million, the 10 millionth Covid vaccine dose has been administered amidst much fanfare and press coverage. Other figures are also emerging: some 300,000 citizens who were due for their second dose of the vaccine never even showed up. One dose will not provide for adequate immunity, rendering the first jabs they did receive as useless.

In a country of 220 million, the 10 millionth Covid vaccine dose has been administered in Pakistan.

Some government officials are taking matters into their own hands: the Chief Minister of Sindh, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, Syed Murad Ali Shah, has ordered the dismissal of salary payments to government employees if they refuse to get vaccinated. This executive order will come into effect from July. The government is considering the establishment of a call centre to contact and convince people to go for their covid jab. Efforts are also being made on the government level to enlist the influence of clerics in propelling awareness and vaccine education drives. This is all proving to be too little too late if numbers do not improve. 

Pakistan remains a high-risk country to travel to and from for developed nations that are well on track in their vaccination drives. The UK and New Zealand both have restricted entry to Pakistani nationals. The vehement resistance of anti-vaxxers in Pakistan will make reaching herd immunity an almost impossible task. And this will mean prolonged restrictions on people wanting to travel from the country.  

Auckland-based Reem Wasay is a journalist and former op-ed editor of Pakistani newspaper Daily Times. She has also worked as a programme coordinator in the non-profit sector in New Zealand.   

- Asia Media Centre